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The last week has effectively been an elegy
on Britain’s recent past and present rolled into one.

This is not just about Thatcher, but the
numerous references to the Churchill and Attlee funerals and how we marked
these past titans. Is this who we really were, we ask with curiosity? Are we
still that same people who dreamed dreams, stood alone against the Nazis, and
built a welfare state, we ask, with a hint of anxiety?

Britain seems increasingly a place shaped
by the allure of living in the past, by the power of previous generations and
the combined cacophonous voices of the dead.

This is not just about the Thatcher moment.
In recent years the British state has increasingly marked its numerous military
and imperial triumphs and engagements. We have honoured Admiral Nelson’s
victory in the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Britain; next year there
is the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Western Europe and
the bizarre celebration of the 100th anniversary of the onset of the
First World War.

It is about more than that. Britain is an
old country, not so much in terms of years but attitude, embracing the argument
put forward by the writer Patrick Wright in the 1980s that Britain developed a
culture drawn to a romanticised, recreated, problematic vision of the past.

This increasingly, Wright argued, came to
be true, post-1979, as a crisis arose in modernity, progress and a shared
national sense of belonging. From this emerged the burgeoning heritage
industry, conservation movement, and the rise of Prince Charles as a bulwark
against modern architecture and planners.

Simultaneously Britain is showing its
crumbling attachment to democracy. This can be witnessed in the potent connection
to the Queen as a person and an institution. She embodies in her 61 year
‘selfless’ reign the last connection to the Britain of our wartime spirit and to
the collective endeavour which followed.

This can be seen in the appeal of Peter Morgan’s ‘The Audience’ with Helen
Mirren playing the constitutional role of Her Majesty which highlights eight of
‘the Dirty Dozen’ Prime Ministers weekly meetings with her. It is as if we are
desperate to find in our divided, diminished society some shared threads which
link us together.

Something is going on deep in the British
national psyche if we can still use this phrase. Britain seems to be shifting
into an age and culture of post-democracy where the democratic impulse is
weakening by the day. The phrase comes from the academic Colin Crouch who has
identified a new alignment of political and business elites who have supplanted
the older democratic institutions. But if this is true we also have to
understand that Britain has entered this phase having never been a fully
fledged political democracy.

Just think of the constitutional elements
of the UK. The House of Commons is the only elected part of the British
political system at the centre. The House of Lords for centuries was filled
with feudal relics and the remnants of monarchial preferment. Now it has become
an emblem of Prime Ministerial patronage; so not much of an advance there;
while our Head of State is clearly unelected and derives his or her legitimacy from
criteria other than the popular will.

More than that, the UK never really - even in
the post-war years - fully embraced modernity, modernisation and being a people’s
state. Instead, the Attlees and Wilsons of Labour’s high tide tried to build a
social democratic country on top of an unreformed Empire state.

The House of Lords is a good analogy for
the whole country; from feudalism to the new class of insider traders in the
political system – from pre to post democracy with no pause in between. That’s
the story of modern Britain.

Within the British political elites there
has always been a fear and foreboding at the threat of democracy might pose to
their way of life. Yet those anxieties about the popular will are also mirrored
in the people themselves.

This is evident in the Scottish debate and
how it situates itself in Britain. Once upon a time the Scots were seen and
even in part saw themselves as too poor, pathetic and divided to be left
running their own affairs. A memory of this still lingers in part of our
collective memory, but it has subsided massively, aided by the achievements of
the Scottish Parliament and revulsion at some of the actions of Westminster.

That anxiety about the people can also be
seen in current English concerns about what happens next year with Scotland’s
big vote if England is left by itself. ‘Don’t leave us with a permanent Tory
England’, The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee implored an Edinburgh Book Festival
audience last year. Now Scottish restraint is seen as essential in preventing
the triumph of an over-zealous, populist right wing Thatcherite English
politics.

The fragility of the democratic impulse,
whether it is measured by political participation, engagement and activism, can
also be seen in the narrow bandwidth of subjects debated, or that on the big
substantive issues, the power and irresponsibility of bankers, inequality,
aiding and supporting people out of poverty, the public increasingly doubt that
politicians can deliver.

The UK has always been a country which has
never been modern, or a proper fully fledged democracy, but the crises of
public values have grown more significant and deep. We now live in a country
which looks to the past for its explanations and vision of the future, which is
obsessed by previous generations and finding its heroes and heroines in the
pantheon of the dead, and which seems when it is not fighting wars to be
constantly marking old imperial adventures.

This might all seem harmless and benign to
some but reveals something about our loss of faith in ourselves and our collective
will. Think of that as Cameron, Miliband and Clegg struggle to explain the
challenges of overcoming the deficit and national debt, and connect with
voters.

Reflect on that as the country pauses next
week for the pomp and grandeur of the Thatcher funeral. What kind of country
are we celebrating or mourning? And what kind of atrophied, disconnected people
does that imply, and are we really happy and content to play such a restricted
role in the body politic of the good ship Britannia?